Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
“For the next few weeks, this”—Marlowe gestured to the room with the butter knife—“the house, the grounds, the woods—is your whole world. You’ll not be permitted to leave. You are our prize, and we have to keep you pure.” Marlowe beamed and bit into his sandwich.
Jericho settled into his room. It was grand, with a four-poster bed worthy of a king. He spread his long body out on it diagonally, taking up as much of the bed as possible. He scissored his arms and legs, laughing. So much space!
Do not stay.…
Startled, Jericho jolted upright and leaped to his feet.
“Hello?” he called to the empty room. It had been a woman’s voice, whispery and urgent. He opened the door and stuck his head out, peering left and right down the wing’s long, deserted hallway.
“Hello?” he said again, but there was no answer. He was alone.
Shaking it off, Jericho drew himself a bath, luxuriating in the deep tub, which he filled with fresh hot water twice just because he could and because there was no one—not Will or Sam or Evie—waiting for their turn. When he returned to his room, a bit pruny from his long soak, a new-model Underwood typewriter and a fresh stack of stationery sat atop the desk. Jericho dressed quickly and threaded a sheet of the fine paper around the typewriter’s cylinder and began a note.
Dear Evie,
I hope this letter finds you well. How is everything at the museum? I imagine Will is still pacing the floor and cataloging his ghost objects. Just as I’m certain Sam is still short.
That part didn’t require code. Take that, Sam.
I’ve just arrived at Hopeful Harbor and am settling in fine. Mr. Marlowe informs me that all correspondence is reviewed to make certain I’m not giving away important Marlowe Industries secrets. You might keep that in mind when writing unless you want the details of your wild parties to end up in the newspapers. Please give my regards to everyone. I’ll write as soon as I have anything worth reporting.
Fondly,
Jericho
Jericho placed his elbows on the desk and brought his fists together, resting his chin across the little trough created by his knuckles as he considered his thoroughly ordinary letter. He wished he had Memphis’s skill with words or a fraction of Sam’s charm. He wished for much more these days, and had ever since Evie had shown up, bursting with ambition. Her appetite for life had unearthed the dreamy boy he’d been before he’d taken sick and nearly died. Before he’d been cast off to the state by his family. After that betrayal—first by his body, then by his mother and father—he hadn’t allowed himself to wish for much.
No, Jericho realized quite suddenly as he watched the weak sun trying to make its presence felt behind the thin cover of clouds on the other side of the leaded-glass window. For most of his eighteen years, he’d been guarding against the brutality of disappointment. This time at Hopeful Harbor was a new start, then. A chance to become the hero of his own life. Perhaps this experiment of Marlowe’s would free him at last from the secret fear that he didn’t deserve happiness.
He’d start tomorrow by working at improving his letter writing, because, ye gods, another one like this, and he’d put Evie straight to sleep. Chuckling over that, Jericho tucked the note into an envelope, addressed it, and left it for the morning’s mail.
Most of the gloom had burned away, leaving a blue sky patched with gray above the rounded backs of the distant mountains. It was a fine afternoon for a walk, and so Jericho wandered into the velvety woods surrounding the property. A hawk circled far above, flying higher until it was an outline against the sun-drenched clouds. Down in the cover of trees, it was dim and quiet except for the rustlings of animals. The heels of Jericho’s boots sank into the leafy thatch with a satisfying thwick, and for a moment, with the smell of pine and earth so close, he was reminded of his childhood on the farm. Were the men tilling the soil for spring planting now? Was his mother letting the lambs out to pasture? Did she and his brothers ever think of Jericho, or had time erased him from their lives the way a river recuts the shape of the bank till its original contours are forgotten?
He looked back to see the faint line of his footprints in the soft earth, a small marker of his quiet presence. “I will not be erased,” he said to the silence of the forest. His words echoed back to him: “not be erased, be erased, rased, rase.”
Farther in, the woods thinned. There were smaller, newer trees here, and some spots where the pine and birch had burned down to nothing more than blackened sticks. Curious, Jericho pressed on, coming to a large clearing that bordered a lake. The area was charred and flattened, as if a great fire had roared through once upon a time.
Soft voices carried on the wind. Jericho whirled around, searching for the source.
“Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”
Silence. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here. What if this part was restricted? The feathery-distant conversations returned with the wind. Laughter. Muffled talking. And just underneath, a faint thread of music: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!”
“Hello?” Jericho called again.
Whispers whipped through the forest with the force of a wind gust, everywhere at once, Jericho at the eye of a sound storm. From the corner of his eye, Jericho caught movement in the trees. He whirled around—“Who’s there!” he demanded, and all at once, the whispering din, the fluttering movement, was gone, as if it had been sucked from the world and contained in a jar. He hadn’t been able to make out what the whispers said, but deep in his gut, he had the same foreboding he’d felt when trapped inside John Hobbes’s murder house: Some memory of bad death lingered here. A silent scream seeking release. And then, very faintly, he heard a last, soft echo on the wind: “The time is now!”
Jericho ran back the way he came and didn’t stop until he was safely inside the mansion.
That night, Jericho lay in the kingly bed in the room Marlowe had arranged for him and reflected on his strange encounter in the clearing. It had felt as if he’d trespassed on holy ground and was being asked to bear witness, though to what, he couldn’t say. He wished that Evie were down the hall so that he could knock at her door with a You won’t believe what happened to me today.… Jericho rolled onto his stomach, only then realizing how utterly exhausted he was. It had been a long day of travel. Most likely, that accounted for what had happened in the woods. Just before he fell deeply asleep, Jericho heard a woman’s soft crying, but he was so tired even that was suspect.
He dreamed he stood in the charred ruins of the forest. The song he’d heard that afternoon came to him: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!” Staticky light lit the sky, splitting the dark clouds like a serrated knife. The wind picked up, blowing dirt into Jericho’s face. He spat and swatted at his face, recoiling as his fingers came away streaked with blood. Blood seeped up from the ground in thick, oozy puddles. It streamed down the hillside and eddied at his feet. Hands reached up from the blood and clutched at his trouser cuffs. Jericho tried to run away from the horror, but the hands’ grip was strong. With a cry, he broke free and ran. The blood flowed past like a river. The music was everywhere. “While you’ve a lucifer to light your… light your… you’ve a lucifer… a lucifer… lucifer… lucifer…”
The sky was tearing apart. Flocks of screeching birds poured out in a wave. And from inside the tear, Jericho heard an insect drone that made his very soul quake. And underneath it all was a machinelike sound, like an automated heartbeat fueled by screams of pain and terror. What was that?
In front of him was the faint impression of a girl with a long braid. Her brown eyes were huge with some unnameable dread. Her voice was like a memory that had taken years to reach him: “Help… please…”
And then Sergeant Leonard stepped out from inside the blighted hollow of a decomposing tree crawling with flies. His face was white as a grease-painted actor’s in a motion picture; dark shadows circled his black eyes. “Hey, kid. Remember me? Your
Jericho moaned in his sleep.
Behind his thin lips, Sergeant Leonard’s teeth were rotten. “You’re behind enemy lines, soldier. Abort your mission. Before it’s too late.”
The following morning, Ames brought Jericho his breakfast on a silver tray. Jericho didn’t fully remember his dreams, only that he’d had them and they’d been disturbing.
“Good morning, sir. I trust you slept well.”
“Yes,” Jericho said, because that was what he was supposed to say.
“Mr. Marlowe will call for you in an hour. Shall I draw you a bath?”
“Thank you.”
Jericho ate his breakfast, took his bath, dressed, and read from Walden: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. In an hour, as promised, Marlowe knocked at his door.
“Are you ready to make history?”
And there was something about the way Marlowe said it, with the full confidence of his optimism, that buoyed Jericho’s spirits. He recalled the promise he’d made to himself the day before. This was his chance to banish the banal fear that lurked in his depths and prove himself heroic. To live deliberately.
Jericho closed the book. “Yes. I’m ready.”
Marlowe smiled. “Then follow me.”
“Roll up your sleeve, please, and lie down on the table,” Marlowe instructed.
Jericho did as he was told, but his earlier enthusiasm dimmed. The laboratory’s hydraulic table had wrist and ankle restraints. He had a visceral memory of all that had come before—the paralysis, the iron lung, the Daedalus program—which made his heart thud hard and fast. Be your own hero, he thought. Jericho lay perfectly still, blinking up at the surgery lights as Marlowe plunged in the needle, pulling out three vials of blood. To this, he added a milky liquid, which curlicued through the red like the weak tendrils of a young plant trying to take root. Marlowe pressed rubber sealings into the glass tubes and secured them in holes anchored inside a small brass box of a machine. A tiny glass door allowed Jericho to view the proceedings from where he lay.
“Here we go,” Marlowe said. He flipped a series of switches along the front panel, and an accordion pump attached to the side whooshed up and down, faster and faster, squealing with the effort. The machine glowed with increasing warmth. Staticky filaments of blue electricity flickered behind the glass, mesmerizing Jericho. At last, Marlowe shut it down; the machine whined into silence again. Smoke poured out as Marlowe opened the door with a rag. The serum had become an inky blue, a night sky captured in glass.
“What is that stuff?” Jericho asked. He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt.
Marlowe beamed. “The Future of America.” He came around and buckled the heavy restraints tightly across Jericho’s wrists and ankles. “Just a precaution. The serum could make you a bit rowdy at first. Not to worry.”
Marlowe leaned over Jericho, his face blocking the bright light, and Jericho had a vivid memory of seeing him for the first time. Jericho had been a young, frightened boy lying inside Jake’s iron lung prototype after the infantile paralysis, and the great man had promised to make him walk again. At the time, Jake Marlowe had seemed like an all-powerful god.
“Jericho?”
“Yes?”
The light behind Marlowe threw shadows across his handsome face. “Let’s make history, shall we?”
With that, Marlowe plunged the hypodermic into Jericho’s arm.
Serum rushed through Jericho’s veins, cold at first, but then warm and warmer still. Sweat dotted his forehead and upper lip.
“What do you feel?”
Fear. Confusion. A need to run. “I… uh… Fight or flight,” Jericho said, panting. “I-I want up. Can you let me up?” Jericho’s muscles tensed. The table rattled.
Marlowe’s voice was reassuring. “It’s okay. It’ll pass. Give it a minute.”
A minute? He wouldn’t last five more seconds. It was too warm. It made his heart race. Jericho thought he would crawl out of his skin. He yanked at the restraints, nearly coming off the table.
“Jericho! Fight through it. Come on!” Marlowe shouted.
Fight it how? Be your own hero be your own…But the intensity clawed at his insides, challenging him. He was as restless as that blue electricity inside the machine. He needed to remove the fear. Unclench his thoughts. Calm. What would calm him?
Evie. He thought of Evie. The two of them soaring above the fairgrounds up in Brethren on the Ferris wheel. The late-afternoon autumn light catching the halo of her loose hair as she laughed and leaned forward, never back, as if she could catch the wind in her arms and hold it. Evie. Evie. Evie. The tension in his muscles eased. His fingers flattened. He was a passenger floating down the river of his own body.
“Jericho?”
“Calm. I’m calm.”
“Good. Good.”
The calm edged into exhilaration and euphoria, like the first swoop of that Ferris wheel. He suddenly felt as if he could do anything—chop down forests, build a cabin or three, hunt deer and wear their skins, conquer new worlds, live as a god; all of it felt like a birthright promised him. The exhilaration told him he could pursue this happiness forever and ever, amen. Jericho liked this new sensation. He liked it very much.
“I’m going to loosen the restraints now, Jericho. All right?”
Yes, yes! Let me loose on the world! “Fine,” Jericho said.
Marlowe unbuckled the leather and helped Jericho to a sitting position and bandaged his arm.
“How do you feel?” Marlowe asked, regarding Jericho quizzically.
How did he feel? Like sunshine lighting the tips of summer grass on a June morning. Like a barn dance in full swing or the morning he’d kissed Evie on the roof of the Bennington as dawn clawed its way up the sides of Manhattan’s ambitious skyline. He felt gloriously, completely, marvelously alive.
“Good,” he said, a little breathless.
Marlowe’s brows came together. “Just good?”
Jericho laughed. “Great. I feel great! Fantastic, in fact.”
“Attaboy!” Marlowe’s grin was a match for the new, expansive joy inside Jericho. If this was the future Marlowe envisioned, Jericho could get used to it. He stumbled off the table and Marlowe caught him.
“Ho! Careful there. You might be a bit woozy at first. That’ll get better with time and more serum. Come on. Let’s start seeing what you can do.”
Marlowe put Jericho through his paces. Jericho pressed a heavy set of iron barbells above his head forty times, holding them up on the last go for a solid five minutes. Push-ups were no trouble. Jericho performed five hundred of them; it seemed like nothing. He wasn’t even winded. While Marlowe drove his protégé through a battery of endurance tests, he’d ask Jericho what he felt:
“Now?”
“Awake. Alive. God, so alive!”
Marlowe beamed. “Keep going.”
At last, they’d finished their routine for the day, three hours of intensive physical training. But Jericho’s blood still called to him: More.
“I think I need to run,” he said, chest heaving with pent-up excitement.
“All right, Übermensch. There are miles of grounds. Go run off some of that incredible energy,” Marlowe said, patting Jericho on the back.
Jericho stood on the front lawn of Hopeful Harbor. Which way to go? Another hawk circled overhead, flying toward the long line of forest. Jericho grinned. He’d give that bird a race. Jericho faced the forest and set off at a clip. Dodging trees was effortless. It was almost as if he could sense them before seeing them, and his sharpened reflexes took over, allowing him to avoid collisions easily. He chased the hawk’s path. The shrubs blurred to blobs of green as Jericho picked up more speed. Wind whined in his ears. Ahead, a towering bank of jagged rocks poked up, demanding caution. Jericho did not slow. In the next second, he was airborne. He’d leaped them without brea
Jericho made a fist, not out of fear but of defiance. It was strong and good. Clean, pine-scented air filled his lungs. The hawk settled nearby. It cocked its head, regarding him not as a man but as an equal. Jericho could feel this. He could feel it! Sun broke through the clouds. It fuzzed the brushstroke tops of the tall pines with gold. Laughing, Jericho tipped his face toward the sky, drinking in the sun till he felt drunk on its promise.
Every day, Jericho ate breakfast and reported to the underground laboratory. They took his blood, and a little while later, they returned with an injection of the mysterious blue serum. They covered his eyes and placed him under a sunlamp and gave him radiation therapy with an X-ray machine. Then there were the endurance tests: push-ups, boxing, running, swimming. They tested him against heat and cold. Gave him complex puzzles to solve. Every day, Jericho noticed significant improvement. He’d come to look forward to it all, waiting for that exhilarating rush as the serum grabbed hold and shook him from the inside, told him who and what he could be if he was willing.
Whenever Jericho had a free moment, he made his way through the house carefully, searching for the card reader, crossing each room off his mental list. He felt a little guilty doing so. Marlowe had been nothing but nice to him; more than nice—he’d seen to Jericho’s every need. Even though he wasn’t really doing anything except looking, he couldn’t help feeling that it was a betrayal somehow. But he’d promised Evie, and Jericho kept his promises. So far, he’d explored ten of the mansion’s many rooms but had had no luck. Still, he knew the machine was there somewhere. He couldn’t explain why he knew, just that he did. It was strange, but since the experiments, Jericho’s senses had all been heightened, along with his strength and his appetite. His vision was phenomenal. He could see a spot on the road nearly a quarter mile away and make out the model of the car from up on the hill. When a squirrel or rabbit scuttled through the grass, Jericho sensed the animal by its musk before it ever made an appearance. Even his hearing had become more acute. Lying on his bed, he’d once heard the slightly muffled voices of the servants in the kitchen and could pick out whole phrases (an Irish maid named Kathleen had a bit of a crush on Jake, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Billings, upbraided her for being “a foolish girl with foolish notions” who should “remember her place.” “But anything can happen here; it’s not like back home,” Kathleen had answered. Mrs. Billings had scoffed, “Fairy tales, my girl.”)